The things we don't say in the dark
by Quarto
Summary: She was sure she was doing the right thing, she just wished it didn't hurt quite so much.
"I do apologize."

"No, no, it's really… It's okay. I get that it's not, um, personal. It's the warmth and the closeness and, just, biology, right? And obviously if I had been awake I would _not_ have, um," Molly could tell she was blushing and with Sherlock's superhuman powers of observation he could probably _see_ that she was blushing, even in the darkness, and oh, _God_ , how she wished she was dead, "Grabbed. It. That way. So that was my bad."

Though, really, what was _she_ apologizing for? In the entire rest of her personal history, when a nice warm man was spooning up against one and pressing a nice plump erection into the small of one's back a quick grope of said erection was an _appreciated_ gesture. But no, this was Sherlock Holmes, and so nothing could ever be simple and she was therefore embroiled in the worst conversation in the history of the English language.

"What are you even doing here?" she asked, more sharply than she'd intended, because _really_.

She could just see the curve of his nose silhouetted by the faint light coming in through the curtained window. Sherlock sighed and said, "John invited Mary to the flat for dinner and a discussion. Because he is still extremely angry he will be increasingly rude and unpleasant to her the longer she stays. Mary will endure this because she still feels quite guilty about the whole fraud and shooting me thing, until approximately two hours into the evening when she will snap. They will then explode like fragmentation grenades into one another's faces, have a screaming row and follow that up with noisy intercourse on the nearest flat surface, after which _she_ will cry and depart and _he_ will start drinking. Heavily. Mrs. Hudson opted for doubling her normal dose of marijuana but since I am currently clean I preferred to simply absent myself from the scene."

"Okay, fine," Molly replied, passing with regret over this dishy little tidbit, "But you really can't keep doing this anymore. What if Tom had been here?"

"I'd have taken the spare room, obviously. This bed isn't nearly big enough for three."

Molly had felt really awful about slapping Sherlock a few months ago. She'd cried afterward, alone in the women's toilets, feeling the sting in her palm. Amazingly that guilty feeling never really lasted long after he opened his mouth.

"I meant," Molly said, slowly, "That he, unlike you, has keys to my flat-"

"I have keys."

"Which unlike _your_ keys, I _gave_ him, and he has a standing invitation to come by whenever he likes. What if he'd seen us like that? How would it look?"

The clause "When he's _so_ jealous of you," she left unsaid but Molly suspected both of them heard it anyway. In their hotel room after the Watsons' wedding she'd had the argument with Tom that they'd been putting off since Sherlock's return, which had come to an end when he'd got very quiet and bitter. In a tone she'd never heard from him before or since, Tom had told Molly exactly who the six foot elephant in the room was that had her hesitating to set a date. Then he'd asked for his grandmother's ring back. Even now, after months of doing all those "working on it" things that they were supposed to, the closest they'd come to dealing with the "Sherlock" question was a sort of agreement that _Molly_ wouldn't mention him and _Tom_ wouldn't ask.

There were a few moments of silence, until she decided to ruin it.

"It's probably actually really good!" Molly found herself chirping.

"Beg pardon," Sherlock replied, flatly.

"I mean erectile dysfunction is super common post traumatic injury, not that anyone talks about it," she said, _oh God maybe_ ** _you_** _should stop talking about it Molly_ , "And given that you were in hospital not all that long ago it's... really good that you are returning to normal adult male physiological function. Meaning random erections."

She was far too shrill. She was talking about his penis. Death could not come too soon. But then...

"It's not purely random!" he blurted.

And that was… really rather startling, wasn't it?

"What?" Molly asked.

"I _mean_ ," he said slowly, "That inasmuch as I can be said to have a "type" in women I prefer slender brunettes, like yourself. You have a wealth of skill and knowledge in a field that I find both personally and professionally interesting. You are on a very short list of people willing to tolerate my company for more than twenty minutes at a time. Also you generally smell of Elizabeth Arden's "Sunflowers", which is pleasant without being overwhelming. Thus…"

And Molly, for a moment, wished the lights were on, because by the gentle jostling of the mattress she strongly suspected he was gesturing at his dick.

"I really don't know what to do about that," she said, after thinking about it.

"Why should you do anything about it?" Sherlock asked, in a tone of honest bewilderment, "Causing it hardly makes you responsible for it. It's an erection. Not a baby."

"No, I meant… since when is this how you feel?" Because there had been _several_ points over the years when Sherlock Holmes confessing he was attracted to her would have made her do an actual victory dance complete with "WOOT"-ing, instead of lying still in the darkness feeling her stomach drop.

"Well, it took a few weeks for me to really ascertain your level of pathology knowledge. But all the rest of it I figured out quite quickly."

Years. The bastard had been keeping this to himself for _years_. "You never said _anything_ to me about it," Molly accused, "Even when you… and when I… you _never_ said."

"No. Relationships in general are bad for brain work. Sexual ones are worse… and yes, because I can hear the question just _springing_ to your lips, I _do_ know that from personal experience. And romance?" he snorted, "One need only look at my undoubtedly blackout drunk flatmate for a negative example."

"Oh, for God's sake, Sherlock," Molly sighed.

" _What_?" he snapped back.

"I hate when you talk that way," she said, "You know damn well John and Mary's problems are _weird_ and not things that happen in real life _._ But it's not just that. If you don't want to date or whatever, that's fine. But you always act like nothing about you matters except your brain."

"Nothing else _does_ matter except my brain. The rest of it is an inconvenient and high-maintenance form of mobility and life support."

"Your _body_ is the sensorium by which you experience the universe, _you twat_. And you treat it like crap. You avoid… I don't even know, love, sex, food _,_ _hobbies_ … everything that you might enjoy apart from solving crimes. You barely even tolerate the fact that you like music, for God's sake. _Classical music_."

Sherlock made a noise deep in his throat then abruptly rolled over, trapping Molly's head between his forearms. With no sign of effort, he levered her legs apart with his own and slotted his pelvis (complete with still _very_ noticeable erection) into the vee of her thighs.

"You might not be aware, Molly," he said in her ear, his face close enough to hers that she could smell the lingering scent of his shaving cream, "That if I paid attention to what my body wanted I would fuck you, right now, until you couldn't walk, regardless of your feelings on the subject. Then I'd go straight out and buy a deck of heroin and... maaaaaybe a line or two of cocaine, not sure, we'd see how I was feeling after the sex, just to take the edge off. Then I'd probably strangle my brother and round out the evening by knocking over an auction house. It's not all _classical music_ in here."

"You're trying to scare me," Molly replied calmly, "It won't work."

"Won't it?" Sherlock growled, punctuating the remark with a grind of his hips which made Molly bite her lip to keep from whimpering with arousal, "A standing cock has no conscience."

It turned out that hearing Sherlock swear twice in the course of thirty seconds was insanely sexy. Molly did what she had to do and angled her head up where she could whisper in his ear, "Nope. You're the best person I know. And you know what else I know?"

"Mmm?" he rumbled, his warm breath on the side of her face.

"This." She then trailed her fingers up his side until he collapsed like a detonated building and started whooping a goofy horse-laugh. Molly had accidentally found out that Sherlock was incredibly ticklish three years ago, while taping up his cracked ribs after he leapt off her roof. She'd never once thought to use it against him... but now she kept on until she had reversed their positions, trapping him in the cradle of her legs, ignoring his protests and " _Molly I am recovering from_ ** _surgery_** "s until he tapped out and said "Fine, fine, uncle."

They paused and caught their breath. Molly had seen him naked probably a dozen times, not that that was any particular accomplishment, if you spent much time at his flat it was more or less inevitable. Keeping Sherlock's inappropriate nudity in check was one of John Watson's great unmentioned life accomplishments, and even he could only manage it while actually _in situ_. Sherlock had seen _her_ naked, because she didn't _always_ sleep in pajamas and he had no sense of boundaries. They'd even been naked together, once, because _someone_ hadn't listened when she'd said, "No, don't touch that, Sherlock, he's about ready to burst," and they'd needed to split a decontamination shower.

Even though she was wearing her underwear and pajamas and he was wearing his boxers, this position, with its pantomime of sex, seemed infinitely more dangerous than any of those other incidents. Sherlock's space-heater metabolism warmed her core through three layers of cloth, and Molly was desperately aware how easy it would be for her to lean down, just the least bit, and catch his mouth in a kiss.

She had to admit he possibly had a point about the body being problematic.

"Out of curiosity, why an auction house?" she asked.

"More challenging than a museum, but more impressive trophies than a bank."

"And then why are you telling me this now?"

Sherlock hesitated, and slowly, carefully, put his hands on her hips.

"It's not as though I came over here planning on it. I really did want to avoid the Morstan-Watson shrapnel. But I've been thinking for some time that the problem of you and I has always mainly been one of _timing_. As in when you were interested I either wasn't, or was into something else-"

"Like dominatrixes or the hot PAs of your enemies…"

" _Dominatrices_ , Molly. Or else legally dead. And then I wasn't any of those things, but you were engaged. And then I was actively using which I'm aware would be a dealbreaker for you. But right _now_ none of that's the case, and I thought that if I tried, before you and Tom make any decisions, that…"

Molly closed her eyes. She was sure she was doing the right thing, she just wished it didn't hurt quite so much.

"But I take it... that I was wrong about that," Sherlock said, "It does happen from time to time."

"I'm sorry," she whispered.

"Because of Tom. Tom the idiot."

"Not just because of Tom. And he's not an idiot."

"Molly, we were _both_ at that wedding," Sherlock said, in tones that could have dried a martini.

Molly blew a strand of hair out of her face and then drummed a rhythm onto Sherlock's sternum with three fingers. "What song is this?" she asked.

He laid still for a few moments feeling the taps and then said, warily, "'Hall of the Mountain King,' I believe. From Grieg's _Peer Gynt._ Is that right?"

"It's not, just for example, binary code for a program that can hack any computer?"

"Oh, bleeding John's bleeding blog…" Sherlock groaned.

"Because even fairly straightforward computer programs tend to be, for want of a better word, lengthy? Which Tom, in that situation, would have _known_ , because he's a _software developer_? There's other kinds of intelligence besides crime-solving, and he has them."

"Really," Sherlock spat back, "So it's not that you realized I was unviable in one way or the other and _immediately_ settled on the next closest thing? Because that's what it's always looked like to everybody else."

Molly blew a raspberry and lightly flicked his ear with her fingertip.

"I know what people think, and they're wrong. I don't like Tom because he resembles you, I first liked him because he… and you… are examples of _my_ type. _You_ like slender brunettes, _I_ like 'em tall dark and skinny."

"Oh, like your dwarf psychopath ex?"

"Now you're just being nasty. I went out with Jim because he was very charming and a great dancer. Anyway it's not like preferring ice cream means a bit of cake isn't nice from time to time."

"Or fruit," Sherlock grumbled.

"Yeah, so I never said this since I didn't want to hurt your feelings, but _that_ was an example of a wrong deduction. I'm _quite_ sure," Molly snapped.

Sherlock stopped the small circling motions his thumbs were making on her hipbones, and coughed, "Really? You said you only went on three dates!"

" _And?_ " She said, bristling, just _waiting_ for him to once again get all Victorian and judgmental at her, like he had _any_ right to it, the great hairy bed-invading... _sextopus_.

He did not do that. His body tensed like a bowstring beneath her and he whispered, "Moriarty… was here? _He was in your home?_ "

"I mean," Molly hesitated, "Well, yes, but we just watched _Glee_ and had some wine and-"

"Wait, what?" Sherlock blurted, laughing, "That man personally killed at least a half dozen people and God only knows how many others he was directly responsible for."

"Well, obviously, had I known that-" Molly started.

"I _personally_ had to spend almost two years picking apart his criminal organization. Interpol is _still_ finding his bank accounts and they're well past the twenty _billion_ dollar mark. And _you_ just casually forced him to watch terrible American television in order to get past your knickers."

" _Glee_. is. _good,_ " Molly gritted out.

Sherlock resumed tracing circles with his thumbs, but somehow the tension had vanished from the moment.

"But Jim… is much more the reason I'm not taking what you're offering than Tom is," Molly said, "I love Tom, I do. He's nice, and he's funny, and he's good in bed. And if he asks me to marry him again, I'm going to say yes. But even if he never does, I can't have… I don't want to have… your life. I don't _like_ accidentally sleeping with criminal masterminds. Or waving off your being shot in the chest by a friend because it's just what needed to happen."

She smiled ruefully, not that he could see it.

"Sherlock Holmes is a wonderful place to visit. But it takes someone special to live there."

"It's… just possible I could change," Sherlock said, dubiously.

"Even if you could," Molly said, "Which you _can't_ , I wouldn't want that. I want to be with someone who thinks being with _me_ is easy."

"Molly? Can you please get off me?"

"Oh, of course, sorry," Molly said, and climbed off him. She decided tonight was probably not the night to repeat the debate over who had a better right to the big bed in the master suite, and was making to go when he bundled her up into his arms and tugged her into the spoons position that had started this whole event.

His erection, she noticed, had mostly gone, which made her feel faintly sad although she knew it was for the best.

Sherlock said into her hair,"Molly, I'm going to be doing something… dangerous. And illegal. At Christmas."

Molly sighed, "How dangerous and illegal?"

"Somewhat and very, respectively. But not unethical, so that's all right. Once I've done everything should calm down a lot. And when it has… can I still visit? Not your bed, anymore, but your flat? And the lab?"

"Oh, God, of course you can, Sherlock. Don't think that-," Molly searched for the words, then folded her hands over Sherlock's, "You'll always have a place in my heart. Always."

"Good. That's… good."

"Just not one in my pants."

"What have I told you about your attempts at wit, Molly?"

Feeling the slow thud of his good heart at her back, Molly dropped back into sleep. He'd be gone when she woke up, she knew… he mostly was, and God knew he was _not_ going to want to have any follow-up to this conversation in daylight.

But when he went, she knew he would always come back.


End file.
